Mapping the world's ecosystems, one functional group at a time

The Global Ecosystems Atlas brings the world's ecosystem maps into a single, comparable view. Instead of asking every country to adopt one national mapping method, it aligns what already exists to a shared typology — so a mangrove in one dataset means the same thing as a mangrove in another.

A shared language for ecosystems

The Atlas is organised around the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology, which describes 110 Ecosystem Functional Groups across the terrestrial, freshwater, marine and subterranean realms. A functional group is defined by how an ecosystem works — its structure, its drivers, the processes that sustain it — rather than by the species that happen to live there.

That distinction matters. Species lists differ between continents, but the functional role of a tropical seagrass meadow is recognisable wherever it occurs. Grouping by function is what makes ecosystems from different mapping programmes comparable at all.

From typology to map

Turning a typology into a global map is largely a translation problem. Contributing datasets are produced at different resolutions, in different projections, for different purposes, and with class definitions written long before the typology existed.

What a functional group describes

Each group sits within a biome, and each biome within a realm. Following that hierarchy upward is how the Atlas answers broad questions — how much of a country is marine, how its forests are distributed — without losing the detail underneath.

Where the data comes from

Source maps come from national mapping agencies, research institutions and global monitoring programmes. Every dataset in the Atlas keeps its own citation, licence and publication year, and each one is listed against the ecosystems it contributes to.

Reading a map that is still being drawn

Coverage is uneven, and the Atlas says so rather than smoothing it over. Some regions are mapped in fine detail by long-running national programmes; others rely on global products with much coarser resolution. Reported extents should be read alongside the coverage figures that accompany them.

What comes next

Coverage grows as national datasets are contributed and reviewed. If your organisation holds ecosystem maps that could be aligned to the typology, the Atlas team would like to hear from you.